8 Kinds of Butterflies Worth Knowing: You can enjoy the beauty of butterflies at any time of the year. Check out our list of the most beautiful and interesting butterflies in North America.
8 Kinds of Butterflies Worth Knowing
Then go outside and try to find and name as many butterflies as you can. These interesting planes should be on your bucket list, even if not all of them will be in your area.
1. Monarch
It’s the most well-known butterfly in the world. The monarch butterfly is famous for its migration. During the spring and summer, several generations make their way north, and in the fall, a generation flies all the way to southern Mexico or the coast of California to spend the winter.
The monarch butterfly goes through several stages in its life. When monarch caterpillars eat milkweed, they take in chemicals that stay in their bodies and make even the adults taste bad to animals that want to eat them.
2. Gulf Fritillary
The gulf fritillary is a stylish butterfly that looks beautiful from every angle. Its long, narrow wings have big silvery spots and a pattern of black lines on orange.
It gets its name from the Gulf of Mexico, but you can find it from the Carolinas to California and even far to the north.
Passion vine, this flashy flyer’s host plant, can be grown by gardeners to make their yards look better and attract it.
3. Cloudless Sulphur
This is one of the biggest yellow sulfur butterflies that live in North America. The males are a light yellow color all over, and the females are white to dull orange.
Most of the cloudless sulphurs are in the South, but in late summer every year, they travel all the way to Canada and other open areas in the north.
4. Giant Swallowtail
Some eastern tiger swallowtails are bigger, but the giant swallowtail, which can be up to five inches long from wingtip to wingtip, is usually thought to be the biggest butterfly in the world.
People often see it in the South, and it sometimes gets as far north as the Great Lakes. Its caterpillars eat the leaves of citrus trees and bushes.
5. Zebra Swallowtail
The zebra swallowtail butterfly is like a dream as it flutters through the forests of the east. Its back wings have long tails and are striped black and white with red spots.
When adults come out in the summer, their tails are usually even longer than those of the broods that come out in the spring.
When they are caterpillars, they eat the leaves of the pawpaw tree, which grows in shady woods a lot in the south.
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6. Western Pygmy Blue
Blue butterflies are all pretty small, but this one is ridiculously small. With its wings spread out, it’s just over half an inch across.
Those wings don’t have much room for color, but a bit of blue shows up when it flies. Western pygmy blues are common in the West and Southwest.
They fly low over salt marshes, desert flats, and even empty lots. They are usually thought of as our smallest butterflies.
7. Harvester
A butterfly that eats meat? It sounds like something from a sci-fi book, but it’s real. These eastern butterfly caterpillars can be found on alders and other plants, but they don’t eat the plants.
They instead eat aphids as they crawl around. The adults of this species don’t usually go to butterfly flowers. Instead, you can see them chasing each other around the edges of alder thickets near streams.
8. Painted Lady
Painted ladies are the most common type of butterfly in the world. They can be found on all six continents and many islands in the ocean. Also, you can find them all over North America, but not all at once.
During the winter, most of them live in the Southwest or Mexico. In the summer, they spread out across most of the continent.
Millions of them fly over open land and sometimes make the news. Help painted lady butterflies on their way south by following these steps.
